How To Dominate Your NCAA March Madness Pool With Social Analytics

Writing on Consumer Tech & Social Media with a satirical, cynical edge

Wesley Iwundu of the Kansas State Wildcats dunks the ball in the first half against the Wake Forest Demon Deacons during the First Four game in the 2017 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament. (Credit: Joe Robbins/Getty Images)

It's that time of year again. Time for 64 of the top NCAA Basketball teams to battle it out to get to the coveted Elite Eight. Then after that four teams play in the Final Four and a national champion gets to ruin a perfectly good net. It's called March Madness and if you aren't in some janky office pool bracket game then you can go back to tweeting "sportsball" and organizing your Dr. Who socks. However, if you are tinkering with your brackets at the last minute, wondering if Villanova will really win it all again this year -- perhaps some social analytics can help you finally pick that perfect bracket.

Head over to FiveThirtyEight if you want live probabilities on which team will win the tournament. Since FiveThirtyEight did such a bang up job during the election and all, I'm sure the numbers are totally accurate. By the buzzer in the final game, we should know who the winner is. While the predictions pour in I'll be over here sweating til the brackets lock tomorrow.

It's not easy to predict who will win the tournament, or even make it out of the first round. According to social media analytics firm Talkwalker, North Carolina is the favorite on Twitter. Since Sunday (when the teams were selected and bracketed) the Tarheels have been mentioned over 26,000 times, with Kentucky right on their heels at 24,000. Kansas, Duke and Villanova are around 13,000 with Florida and Michigan -- who are not top seeds -- coming in at around 11,000 mentions.

Of course all this could mean that thousands of Gonzaga fans are sh*t-posting the other teams, or it could mean that thousands of people predicting the same outcome could be right.

The wisdom of the crowd isn't necessarily a bad thing, except according to your mom if there are bridges involved. The NYTimes has created a chart compiled from four statistical models and two public brackets that breaks down the percentage odds to win in each round of the tourney for every team. It's no surprise that Villanova, Kansas, North Carolina and Gonzaga have the best odds, being the number one seeds after all. Of course, this kind of takes some of the fun out of picking your March Madness brackets. Thankfully, we all know that it never goes exactly as planned.

That's because it is nearly impossible to pick a perfect bracket. In fact, the odds are 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. That's a quintillion for those of you playing at home. Jeffrey Bergen, a professor of mathematics at DePaul University, breaks it down for you in this video from 2012. So maybe you can't pick the perfect bracket, but you can get pretty close if you just put your ear to the ground (or do a Twitter search) to hear what everyone else is predicting.

The reason being is that if your bracket is similar to everyone else's bracket (say, everyone picks North Carolina to get to the Final Four since they are the most talked about) then you have a better chance of staying in the game. All you need to win is that one extra team that nobody else picked to hang in there.

What you'll need is that sweet, sweet Cinderella pick. Like in 2013 when nine seed Wichita State rolled through to the Final Four but lost to Louisville. So who is the Cinderella team this year? Could it be Northwestern? With over 8,000 mentions since sliding into the brackets on Sunday, they could be the Cinderella team. Personally I've gone with the Miami Hurricanes as my unexpected Final Four team.

It's called March Madness for a reason. There is no telling what will happen. The Final Four could easily be the number one seeded Gonzaga, Villanova, Kansas and North Carolina. Or it could be Florida, Florida State, UCLA and Michigan. While the statistics favor the former, the latter is not completely defeated by the math. While going with the crowd could give you the best bracket to stay near the top, chaos factors in just as much as predictive analysis.

While social analytics might give you an edge, you are going to have to accept the fact that you have as much a chance as winning as the cat lady from accounting who picks teams based on the color of their jerseys. Good luck.

Author Bio: Writing about consumer technology, social media and the deep layers of psychological torture endured by all of it. The world is changing, but that doesn't mean we can't be cynical about it. It's not all sunshine and roses in Silicon Valley. It's self loathing, pr...